Villainess
by Dalliancetreads
Summary: It's Bella's turn to make the age-old choice between her freedom and a man. New Moon/Volturi scene AU.
1. Chapter 1

Spared the singularly adolescent fate of becoming a cautionary tale, Bella Swan clung with white knuckles to her lover's elbow as her life was threatened for the second or third time that day, she forgot. A part of her worried the stress would prematurely age her — grey hair, a permanent furrow betwixt the brows and a dowager's hump, geriatric at eighteen.

"Edward," she whimpered, her trepidatious fingers gluing to his skin.

"Don't fear, love," he said, a whimsical hook in the corner of his mouth like a caught trout, cheek-to-cheek with Bella so she felt the baby hair dappling his cold-cream skin. "We haven't broken the law."

It wasn't the law she feared, and she expressed this by pressing her clumsy, clammy body against him, the blood distending her swan's neck, her slender-but-not-athletic ankles.

"If I may be so rude — that is not for you to decide," the leader of the Volturi said, a watery apologetic note smearing his voice. He spoke as if aware he made a fool of himself in the hyperbolic governmental robes of a circus performer and was begging Bella to join the shared hallucination of his polystyrene courtroom.

"Will you offer immortality to your beloved, Edward?"

A bronze forelock fell into Edward's eyes but he didn't brush it back. "You're asking me to destroy Bella's soul and everything wholesome in my existence," he said. Bella blushed, ridden with guilt and pleasure for possessing this death-and-roses boy who whispered violet prose to her in the darkness of her bedroom and made her feel a secret throb of specialness.

"Spoken like the true son of Carlisle," Aro equivocated. "Of course, I could simply envenomate the girl myself..."

His eyes, the pink of kittens' tongues, met Bella's. Although his demeanour was clownish, nothing like the sun lit his gaze — she felt it everywhere, all the places touched by the corpse hand of winter.

"Would you like that, Isabella?" The question was innocuous, but something lurked just outside Bella's comprehension, something immodest and dark.

Prompted by his words, she imagined herself in the man's thanatoid embrace, finally sloughed from gawky girlhood, her bare, vernal thigh dense against his erection. A sleek vampiric concubine unmoored in twin states of lust.

How different from the fate Edward prescribed her, his dream of a twilight bride — a liver-spotted lizard whose wedding vows gurgled with pneumonia, sighing 'I do' in his lilied ear as she expired. Her ashes on his bookshelf, self-flagellation for his future romances.

Sometimes, Edward's butterfly kisses were as heavy as death sentences.

"Honestly, I don't know," Bella said, as the fire in her cheeks chewed its way to her eyes.

Aro's expression didn't change, although his shadowspun assembly stilled, coalescing into the spikes of an Iron maiden. "Then perhaps I have something to offer you," he continued. "And perhaps you have something I very much desire. Perhaps we can broker a deal."

"_No_," Edward hissed. Behind him, Alice gasped.

"Would you like to make a deal with me, Isabella?" The palatal Italian accent coupled with her more sophisticated given name, a swill of wine swimming from his teeth to the base of his throat, inoculated her with erotic tension.

"Maybe," she said. Her voice was small, even to her ears. "The terms?"

"Immortality, of course — upon my word I shall not kill you."

Although tremulous, she was propelled by curiosity above obligation. "And?"

"Precisely that which your lover desires, because he cannot have your mind. We are not so different." His teeth clamped in a spurious grin, a wet, carmine gash in his tatterdemalion glamour so she couldn't forget he was a time-hardened executioner, a devourer, the very conceit of death and darkness.

"Your virginity, my dear."

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**Author's note: **this was written purely for my entertainment (hence the silliness/purple prose). It's going to be about 3 or 4 parts long, but I'm very open to advice or suggestions, and as always, reviews are a delight! :)


	2. Chapter 2

Renee nicknamed Bella "hoover" as a kid because she sucked food right off her plate, abandoning knife and fork in order to accelerate the process. She read more than anyone in her class and precociously locked the smooth crotches of her barbie and ken dolls together. Something inside her burned like a subterranean fire.

She was told an imagination was the best thing a girl could have. Knowledge is limited, but an imagination embraces the entire world.

* * *

_Bella lies in a bed of roses, extravagantly large and luscious, dripping wet, in infinite bliss. The Meadow is a sandpit in comparison... _

She wakes up feeling emotionally wrung out, rotten and oily, from her blowsy three-day-old ankle socks to her dry-bitten fingernails. Her heart aches like a squeezed blister.

"Bella, dear. You're awake at last." Aro perches on the bed next to her, smiling like a physician holding a needle smiles at small children. They're in a windowless, turpentine-and-oak smelling room. A grandfather clock ticks in the corner. There are several antique dovetail cabinets and a roll top desk so fine an empire might be run from it.

"Where am I?" She squirms uncomfortably. Her menstrual pad leaks slowly, and the criminal bloodstain reminds her of the other blood that may stain this bed - because Edward stupidly refuses to make her a vampire. She feels like a bad dog left at the pound, only for the person who is the reason for her existence to return and put a gun to her head, a halo of cold, trembling metal. Her questionless trust absolves her of all responsibility. She just wants to be Snow White, sleeping forever in her crystal coffin with Prince Charming by her side.

"You fainted during our little tête-à-tête. It seems you forgot to breathe," Aro says with amusement and a hint of impatience. "I never heard your answer."

The belittlement in his voice gets a rise out of her. Not to mention her other hang-ups, she can't stand the thought of him crawling all over her like a tarantula. "My answer's _no_, obviously. No offence, but you're creepy and old."

"None taken," he says goofily, with a deep-freeze butcher's grin and eyes that could split marrow. She thinks about her blood running down his chin to meet his dusty adam's apple, taut like a bow string in the crook of her palm. How he could make her vulnerable, but be completely in her thrall. Heart to unbeating heart. His lips at her throat like a knife, offering her two kinds of death.

"I'm older, and so much creepier, than you can possibly fathom. Though it would be nice to have something young to hold, and not have it fall apart in my arms." He presses his colourless lips together.

"Right," Bella says.

"Alice and Edward are upstairs in the foyer. You may return to them, if you wish."

"Not yet," she says. Her heart does a loop-de-loop as she imagines confronting Edward, who would be patient and understanding and good, and not because she deserves it. "I think I need some space to think things over," she amends.

Aro grins clownishly, as if his nose honks if you tweak it but also like he stalks children in the dead of night. "It would be my pleasure to accommodate you here. I will personally ensure no-one bothers you so you can... how do you say... clear your head."

Bella blushes. "You know, you don't live up to the hype of an evil vampire overlord."

"Public servant, my dear. Would you prefer someone else to be your evil vampire overlord, possibly even more evil and murderous than I?"

"No, thank you."

"I only have one _teensy-tiny_ condition."

"Oh no, not that again - I already told you -"

"It's something else." His airy voice is punctured, ragged, poked with iron. "No door will be barred from you. But I beg you - I implore you - do not go near the tower."

"Why? What's in there?" Her stomach throws around fistfuls of confetti. Piles of skulls, rivers of blood? The scene of a murder? Chained werewolves? Untold riches?

"My wife, Sulpicia, inhabits that place. I can't be sure you will be safe with her. She has an unstable temperament... and you may provoke her wild jealousy."

"I didn't know you had a wife," Bella says uncertainly. Was it something Edward mentioned in Vampire one-oh-one? What is there to be jealous of?

Aro ignores her, as he seems to do with anything he prefers not to answer. A trait he shares with Edward. "I will inform Edward and Alice of your decision - tactfully, of course."

"Fine," she says.

He shoots her a quizzical look, but leaves her alone to stare blankly at the smoke-stained maroon wallpaper. She only sees Sulpicia, lovely and mad as only a true Lady of the Night could be. She wears a floor-length gown that exposes her shoulders and the swanlike column of her neck. Her eyes are flat black, and she crooks a finger in a mocking come-hither gesture, nails filed sharply to points and painted a red so dark they nearly match her black dress. Aro's shadow, his blood diamond, a jade cicada, hard-edged, balletic, destructive, forbidden, lethal as a panther. She's already better than Bella in a million ways.

Self-contained in her cardigan and her many genetic shortcomings, Bella wonders what she'll be like as a vampiress. Would she be locked in a tower, like Aro's wife? Would it be because she's the princess, or the dragon? She crawls off the bed and follows Aro into the gelid hallway, treading through darkness so thick she might choke on it.

* * *

**Author's note: **I can't believe it's been over a year since I posted the first chapter! I was a little overwhelmed by the positive feedback and hope this update meets all of your expectations.

The "imagination... entire world" is a famous quote attributed to Einstein.

Please leave a review to let me know what you think!


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